BROTLI: Brotli's place on the decompression frontier is currently too fuzzy on the ratio axis, so an easy prediction is the compressor will get tightened up. Its current entropy coding design may have trouble expanding to the right much further. (The same situation as LZHAM. The fast entropy coding space is moving rapidly right now.)

Long Term

New Territory: Theoretical future "holy grail" codec which will obsolete most other codecs. Once this codec is on the scene most others will be as relevant as compress. If you are working in the compression space commercially this is where you should be heading.

Note the circle is rough. I tried to roughly match Brotli's ratio in region 4, but it could go higher to be closer to LZMA/LZHAM.

About Me

Back in the day I worked for several years at Digital Illusions on things like the first shipping deferred shaded game ("Shrek" - 2001), software renderers, and game AI. Then, after working for Microsoft at Ensemble Studios for 5 years as engine lead on Halo Wars, I took a year off to create "crunch", an advanced DXTc texture compression library. I then worked 5 years at Valve, where I contributed to Portal 2, Dota 2, CS:GO, and the Linux versions of Valve's Source1 games. I was one of the original developers on the Steam Linux team, where I worked with a (somewhat enigmatic) multi-billionare on proving that OpenGL could still hold its own vs. Direct3D. I also started the vogl (Valve's OpenGL debugger) project from scratch, which I worked on for over a year. In my spare time I work on various open source lossless and texture compression projects: crunch, LZHAM, miniz, jpeg-compressor, and picojpeg.